Businesses often use checks and cash to pay suppliers, also known as merchants. These businesses do not have a low cost, easy way of comparing their financial performance of using a commercial card, such as a credit or debit card, to pay a merchant versus using cash or check to pay the merchant. Stated otherwise, these card holding businesses do not have a way of comparing the savings that they could realize from paying with a credit card or a corporate card as compared to suppliers dealing in goods and services of like categories.
It is desirable for a business to have a way of valuating the financial benefits of paying with a credit or debit card as opposed to paying with cash or checks. For instance, by eliminating a purchase order, an invoice and a check payment to a merchant, there is a concomitant reduction in processing activities and costs for paying bills to the merchant. A business that pays by corporate card, such by a credit card or debit card, can streamline its operations and reduce their soft and hard dollar expenses, as well as potentially increasing rebates paid back to the business from the issuer of the corporate card.
A company that can use a corporate card to pay its bills from merchants, as well as the bank that issues the company its corporate card, needs a way of deciding what is the best and most cost efficient way to design and implement a plan to change from paying its merchants with cash or checks to pay those merchants by credit cards or debit cards (i.e., corporate card).
A business needs a way of identifying which of the merchants that the company buys from will accept credit and debit cards as payment for the supplies that they sell to the business. Once these merchants are so identified, they can be ranked from highest to lowest in terms of what priority and what benefit might be realized by the business paying the merchant with a corporate card, such as a credit or debit card.
By rating each supplier according to the priority by which they should be paid by a debit or credit card, a company can streamline the processes that they pay those suppliers most efficiently, as well as identify opportunities to increase working capital that can be used to pay the suppliers, as well as identifying which of the business's suppliers are most appropriate for being paid by debit or credit card.
It would be an advantage in the art to provide analytical tools and services that will help businesses, as well as the banks that issue credit and debit accounts to those businesses, to improve and expand their programs for using debit and credit cards.
It would also be an advantage to the art to provide a tool by which a business could predict which of their suppliers would be most likely to accept debit and credit card payments.
It would further be an advance in the art to determine the savings that might be realized, and the return on investment that might be realized, by changing a business's policy of paying with cash and checks to a policy of paying certain of its suppliers with debit and credit cards.